The past year at Vimeo has been filled with incredible highs (we went public! we grew our team to 1,000 employees!), as well as real challenges, as we navigated a global pandemic and political and social unrest around the world. While we have adapted our approach as we learned, our goal has remained the same: we are committed to building an inclusive culture where all of our people — employees, customers, and partners — can support each other and thrive. We believe that doing so is not only good for business, but essential to building a great company. 

Since our last DEI update, we have continued to try new programs, learn and adapt, educate ourselves, and use our platform and our resources to effect change. From honest conversations on racial bias, intersectionality, and mental health, to supporting organizations on the frontlines of COVID-19 and cancer research, to celebrations of Pride and Juneteenth, to new recruiting practices and training, we have done a lot.

And we have seen that when we partner together, with empathy leading the way, we can make a real difference for our team and within our communities. But despite our efforts, our workplace diversity metrics are not where we want them to be. We haven’t moved the needle in our workplace representation to match our intent, so there’s real work to do.

Whenever we face a tough business challenge at Vimeo, we ask ourselves what’s working, and what isn’t (yet). We use this framework in our meetings as a way to be intellectually honest about what we need to do better. So here’s where we made the most progress in our DEI efforts, as well as where we have the most work to do:

What’s working

Our People team added more structure, transparency, and accountability to our hiring, performance, and HR policies, including:

  • Conducting annual leveling, compensation, and pay equity reviews for our employees. 
  • Adding new inclusion tools for our recruiters who audit job descriptions for inclusive language, capture pronouns from applicants, and assist with name pronunciation.
  • Establishing self-care days and vacation minimums to encourage employees to take the necessary time for themselves and their mental well being.

Our Employee Community Groups (ECGs) continue to scale and act as passionate drivers of our culture and programs:

  • We now have hundreds of employees engaging with our 6 ECGs (A11Y, VimEco, Vimeans for Good, Vimeans of Color, Queereo, and Vimeown). Each ECG has an annual budget, mission, executive sponsorship, contributes to a monthly newsletter, and provides quarterly updates to the company in our People & Culture town hall. 
  • ECG programs have included creating psychologically safe spaces to discuss topics like microaggressions, mental health and anxiety, hosting workshops on topics like financial literacy, climate change and authentic leadership, supporting film festivals like Reelabilities and Newfest as well as local minority-owned businesses, and providing guidance to our product team on how we can make better choices related to user accessibility.

Our Marketing, Product, Partnerships, Community, and Legal teams have found new ways to use the scale of our platform to advocate for change, including: 

  • Investing in highlighting Black-owned businesses and filmmakers through Stories in Place, a program providing seven Black filmmakers the opportunity to produce films that show the spectrum of experiences among Black small-business owners and their communities in the shadow of a global pandemic, economic collapse, and ongoing racial injustice.
  • Partnering with both TikTok and Facebook to support Black-owned businesses by providing access to Vimeo’s tools and educational resources.
  • Taking over key parts of our site to encourage voting in the US and guide individuals through their voting plan (how to register, where to vote).
  • Petitioning the FCC to reinstate Net Neutrality, as we fundamentally believe that open access to the internet is indispensable for ensuring everyone can use the internet to express themselves freely.

What we’re working on

We have further investments to make on the People side to move the needle on inclusion, engagement, and workplace representation. To do this, we are: 

  • Conducting a full review of our benefits offerings, with well-being (both physical and mental) being a key focus.
  • Rolling out Competency Rubrics for every department so there is consistency and transparency for individual performance expectations as well as expected contributions for building an inclusive team.
  • Working to increase making more diverse hires. Earlier this year we rolled out a diverse candidate pipeline target for all new roles, that requires our recruiters to ensure that women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and / or candidates with disabilities comprise a minimum of 30% of candidates who reach the phone screen interview stage in the hiring process. We are seeing increased diversity at the top of the hiring funnel, but now need to focus on converting that funnel to drive a clear increase in diverse hires.
  • Investing more in Inclusion focused workshops and making them required for more employees.

As a stand-alone public company, we will be establishing Vimeo’s formal Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies and publishing our first Annual ESG Report next year. We’ve started this work by investing in two forestry projects to offset Vimeo’s 2020 carbon emissions and kicked off Vimeo’s first ever Carbon Emissions Report.

We are building out new leadership focus for DEI and are in the midst of hiring our new Head of DEI. We look forward to working with them to take our DEI strategy to the next level in 2022. 

Looking ahead, our philosophy remains the same: to embed equity and inclusion as essential principles in how we build our teams and our products. We’ll remain focused on identifying and mitigating biases that preserve the status quo. We will prioritize diversity, empathy, candor, and transparency in our office culture. And we will continue to adapt our approach until we find what works. 

We also believe that sharing our aggregate employee demographics is an essential part of our commitment to DEI. So below is our U.S. workforce data by gender, race, and ethnicity in 2020, as compared to 2019.

Vimeo’s 2020 workforce representation

The problems worth solving are rarely easy to solve. It takes persistence, creativity, honesty, and passion to innovate in bold new ways. We’re excited to partner with our incredible team of Vimeans and with thought leaders in the space to keep trying, relentlessly, until our metrics match our beliefs. And we’ll keep you posted on our progress. 

With love, 

Vimeo

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In-house art by Megan Lucki and Annette Wong.